Getting past curiosity

12-29-2011, 11:21 PM

Hi all,

One of my challenges is that I am a highly curious person. My role allows and indeed, even encourages this. However it means that I have times where I become unproductive where my curiosity goes overboard.

Has anyone needed to deal with this themselves? If so, what tips do you have?

One of my challenges is that I am a highly curious person. My role allows and indeed, even encourages this. However it means that I have times where I become unproductive where my curiosity goes overboard.

Has anyone needed to deal with this themselves? If so, what tips do you have?

I think there's a no cure for curiosity. And we know that curiosity killed the cat. Let's hope someone will invent a pill or a vaccine...

Comment

One of my challenges is that I am a highly curious person. My role allows and indeed, even encourages this. However it means that I have times where I become unproductive where my curiosity goes overboard.

Has anyone needed to deal with this themselves? If so, what tips do you have?

Thanks,

Matt

I'm in kind of the same situation. What I have found is that doing GTD strictly helps me make sure that I don't neglect things that need to be done in favour of things that are simply just more interesting.

I am also working on building into my system a principle of avoiding rabbit trails and instead capturing all my ideas for later processing. Many times, I find that what seemed like a good idea at the moment of inspiration really isn't that much of a deal when I come back to look at it later.

But I'm sure interested to hear about anything else you find out on this.

Comment

Depending on how long you can/want to allow yourself to follow your curiosity, set a timer or periodically schedule a "meeting with yourself" (=block time in calendar, even if it's just 5 minutes) to ground yourself: Am I really doing the right thing here ? What _needs_ to be done right now ? What have I learned/found out that needs to be kept ?
The answer may very well be: OK, follow that curiosity some more.